[QUOTE=casdave]
Whilst the judicary does not set policy politically, it can certainly make laws in its rulings that affect both the interpretation of th constitution, and also in the way the rulings operate, such rulings can effectively beome national policy.
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Actually, this is not quite true. An appeals court can rule on a motion made by one party to interpret existing law in a particular way. Eventually, if it gets to SCOTUS, the Supremes can issue a ruling that interprets existing law in a way to have the effect of creating new law. (This, of course, is one of the fierce debating points regarding all judicial rulings, (“activist judges,” “living document,” “originalists,” “textualists,” and all those buzz words one sees a lot in GD and the Pit), that is actually hotly debated in the U.S.) It still requires a specific motion in regards to an existing law–particularly at the trial court or appellate court level.
[QUOTE=casdave]
In this case, the rulings of the judiciary effectively blocked extradition in such a way that the UK and other international observers decided future attempts were not realistically going to be worthwhile, and in this manner it became US policy as observed by other nations.
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So a single opinion by a minority of justices in a single appellate district was enough to persuade the British government that they had no hope of winning their case? To me, that strongly suggests that either the Brit government did not understand the U.S. judicial system or that the case was decided on much stronger evidence than you have provided, here.
[QUOTE=casdave]
It was the responsbility of the executive to oversee this process, and enact such changes to the law as required for a fair extradition process, clearly the prospect of this happening was remote, to say the least.
[/QUOTE]
No. Not in the U.S. It may work that way in Britain, but that is not how the government or courts are organized in the U.S.
[QUOTE=casdave]
So yes, directly and indirectly, both through the judiciary and the executive, the US became a safe haven for Irish terrorists, and the inaction to deal with their fundraising for a violent terroristic function is certainly something that should have been dealt with on a federal level, and indeed this happened, but only well after terrorism came home to the US in the form of the Oklahoma boming and the disgraceful Omagh bombing of WW2 veterans, all of a sudden, after 20 years of tacit support through inaction the US started to wake up to the reality of what terrorism means.
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We have addressed the judiciary (although probably not to your satisfaction, I’m sure). The executive has no such powers as you seem to believe are available. The limited steps taken after the WTC/Pentagon attacks in the form of executive orders were mostly issued in the context of implementing existing U.S. legislation regarding attacks on the U.S. The few that did not rely on actual legislation were also done as direct responses to attacks on the U.S. The various Irish groups were always canny enough to refrain from picking any U.S. targets.
I will grant that U.S. society was too tolerant of supporting terror in Ireland, as long as you recognize that it was a matter of political will by the Congress, (as influenced by political lobbying organizations), not simply individual actions by various presidents.
[QUOTE=Dominic Mulligan]
But why didn’t the executive branch freeze assets like we saw in the post 9/11 world? Why did it take the petitioning of the American government by Ulster MP’s before Irish funding was cracked down on by Bush, even after 9/11? Why, prior to 9/11, were terrorist organisations allowed to continue operating within American borders without being outlawed?
NORAID is now a banned organisation in America. Yet it took an attack on American soil for this to happen.
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As noted, there is a strong sentiment among U.S. citizens of Irish descent that the “resistance” was a legitimate process. I would guess that bombings in Britain, (whch, while horrible, were still fairly rare), were simply not noticed as often as killings in Ireland. With what (from the left side of the Atlantic) appeared to be government collusion with one side against the other, any effort to crack down on the support for the IRA would have evoked a rather nasty response for any number of legislators at election time.
Note, that while the questions raised in this thread have been “Why did the U.S. government permit the funding of terrorists?” the question asked in the U.S. for 30+ years was “Why does the British government fail to clean out the terrorists from the RUC, UDR, UDA, UVF, etc.?”
I can see where someone living on the island of Great Britain would be upset that funds from the west of the Atlantic were used to kill people in pubs in Brighton and elsewhere, but the people sending that money kept reading the reports about British government sponsored terrorism in Ulster and they would have been really upset if the U.S. government had “taken sides.”
As to the situation following 11 September, 2001, note that by that time the Belfast Accords had been signed (if not actually adopted) three years previously and it was easier to portray anyone still pushing terrorism as part of a world-wide problem that already had a (paper) solution in Ireland.
Regarding sanctions against particular groups, I would guess that it would be a matter of which groups were able to get the best lobbyists to keep them off any list of terrorists.